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AIthough the Argentine invasion only instilled in the Falklanders a deeper sense of suspicion and dislike of the Argentines, the islanders often displayed sympathy over the plight of individual soldiers. The islanders fed hungry Argentines at their back doors, passing out sweets and cigarettes. "I caught the fear in their eyes," says Msgr. Spraggon. "One soldier violated the curfew one night to see me and just broke down and cried and cried.
'Son,' I told him, 'you just cry, you're going to be better afterwards.' " The Falklanders have been far less resourceful, even somewhat helpless, in coping with the arrival of the British forces. The soldiers have filled nearly every house in town up to the attic, drying their uniforms across backyard clotheslines.
They have occupied the town gymnasium, and sleep on the floors of the courtroom and the town magistrate's office. They even come into the kitchens of the tin and clapboard seafront houses to take tea from their adopted mums like loving sons.
Many of the residents now feel oddly useless and irrelevant on their own islands. They feel unable to convey their mixed feelings of gratitude and frustration to the troops as they again assume the role of a submissive population. "I had to watch myself the other day," says one Port Stanley resident. "The soldiers thought they were being helpful by burning up my wood boxes. They thought it was rubbish. They don't understand how important everything is to us here. Wood is too expensive to burn." Snaps one housewife whose small cottage now contains nine soldiers: "You have to bite your tongue from thinking they liberated us so we could wash their laundry and clean their plates. I wonder who is going to rescue us from them?"
Broadcaster Watts is one of the few islanders to discuss the dilemma openly. "British ships and the British military presence is something we have always wanted here. Now we must decide whether we can carry on our lives underneath all this British pressure or whether we revert to the way of life we had before, with the same dangers. It's no good saying we can forget about the Argentines. We can't. The military have taken over our airport. We are going to have to learn where this leaves us and where this is going to take our futures."
The former British Governor, Rex Hunt, who returned to the Falklands under the new administrative title of civil commissioner, last week donned his red tunic with the silver braid and put on his hat with the ostrich-feather plumes to open the first postwar session of the legislative council. He puckishly paraphrased Winston Churchill to thank the British liberators: "Never in the course of human conflict has so much been owed by so few to so many." Says an admiring islander of Hunt: "He knew us before, he knows our problems, he knows the way of life we had before and he knows the way of life the people want."